Veni, vidi, vicipaedia

Today is J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday. He’d be 115 today, actually, which mainly makes me wonder why I wasn’t paying attention when his eleventy-first birthday happened back in 2005. ~sigh~

To verify the year, I went to Wikipedia’s Tolkien page. And then curiosity got the better of me and I thought I’d see what else happened on January 3 and who Tolkien shared a birthday with (Victor Borge, Mel Gibson, and Martin Galway were the only ones I recognized).

And then I saw something I’d never noticed before, but which made my heart do a little dance for joy: in the Languages sidebar on the left sat a quiet little link that read “Anglo Saxon.” No way, I thought.

Way.

Sure, there are only about a thousand content pages, and this is reconstructed Old English and not authentic, but wow, it’s still cool. Take the page for Nīwu Englisc sprǣc, for example. (That’s “English” for us moderners.) Lots of juicy Old English.

And of course I now started wondering what other languages Wikipedia has been translated into that don’t necessarily serve any purpose, whether because they’re dead or because they’re made up. There’s Latin (17,678 articles!), Sanskrit, Pali, Old Church Slavonic, Gothic, Klingon, and a heck of a lot of other ones. Oh, and Esperanto, but even though it’s a created language, I wouldn’t really say it fits into the same category as the rest of these. (See the List of Wikipedias page for the full list.)

So what? For me, being a full-fledged linguaphile, no explanation is necessary. Yes, many of these languages are dead. Yes, they are arcane. Yes, only weird people study them. :P

But Wikipedia’s sort of helping bring them back, even if it’s just one or two puffs of the breath of life. Each of these pages has the language being used, and that’s a beautiful thing. Whether Low Saxon or West Frisian or Irish or Scots Gaelic (you can see where my linguistic interests lie :), and no, not all of these languages are dead), it’s very, very cool to see freely accessible texts that you can look at. Ever wanted to learn Walloon? There’s almost ten thousand articles you can read.

I’m very much of the persuasion that diving in and reading texts in a foreign language is an excellent way to learn how to read that language (and to learn vocabulary), and here you have corpora (some rather substantial) for hundreds of languages. Including most of those Tolkien studied. (Yes, there was a connection after all. :))

“Oh, and Esperanto, but even though it’s a created language, I wouldn’t really say it fits into the same category as the rest of these.”

Sure not. :-)

Visit http://www.lernu.net

Cool! I was born on J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday:)

I like that you made mention of Esperanto’s “created” status, but didn’t for Klingon.

I’m pretty sure that if I could take a Scots Gaelic course at BYU I would be on that so fast . . .

Now, I just need a pronunciation guide to go along with the Wikipedia articles. Or better yet, someone that can just read it to me. I’m kind of slightly obsessed with Scotland. http://kallisti-discord.blogspot.com/2007/12/scotland-here-i-come.html

Thlingan is awesome.

Qa’pla!

Ulo: Thanks for the link!

Janet: Happy birthday, and dang, I’m jealous. :)

M: That’s because Klingon was discovered, of course, just like Quenta and Sindarin. :P

Mary: The Celtic languages seem to be rather underrepresented at universities, I’m afraid. In fact, just twenty minutes ago Katya posted about the Less Commonly Taught Languages database (which is admittedly not completely up to date, but it’s a good general measure), and not a single university teaches Scots Gaelic (listed as Scottish Gaelic). More’s the pity. As for the pronunciation, there’s the pronunciation section of the Wikipedia page, and the sound files section of the IPA page to make sense of the symbols used. Good luck. :)

sixline: Um, qa’pla right back atcha? :)

I know a professor who, referring to ancient Greek, said, “This language is alive! Well, sort of. It’s alive on the page!” It was funny, even though I understood what he was getting at. So there you go. Looks like some “dead” languages are alive on the (web)page, after all.

Great. Now I will probably spend too much time browsing the articles in Quechua.

Haha, yes, I think languages come to life every time someone reads them, not just speaks them. Not full life, of course, but still, it’s some semblance of it. And that counts for a lot. The only languages that are truly dead are those that nobody reads or speaks.

Enjoy the Quechua. (Why do I feel no remorse? :))